Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Laguna XS 2.1 vs Ling-3.0-tiny

Laguna XS 2.1 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on reach and documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Laguna XS 2.1 C

Best for Agents that want a fast local coding model on a 32 GB GPU or Mac, with tool calling and a permissive licence.

Ahead on

  • Risk, 55 against 50
  • Agent interface, 85 against 60

Watch for

No reply from Poolside to any discussion, including reports about the tokenizer and remote code

Ling-3.0-tiny C

Best for Agents on a laptop or small GPU that want a fast local model for tool calls and short reasoning, under MIT

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 85
  • Documentation and upkeep, 56 against 46

Watch for

No hosted provider today, and Ollama support is only an unmerged pull request

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLaguna XS 2.1Ling-3.0-tinyEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258590Ling-3.0-tiny +5
Risk20%205550Laguna XS 2.1 +5
Agent interface10%108560Laguna XS 2.1 +25
Documentation and upkeep10%104656Ling-3.0-tiny +10
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 55/100

Facts side by side

FactLaguna XS 2.1Ling-3.0-tiny
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorPoolsideinclusionAI (Ant Group)
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceOpenMDW-1.1MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-192026-08-31
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Laguna XS 2.1

A small coding and agent cousin with 3B active parameters, so it's quick on modest hardware. Poolside's 4-bit GGUF, also Ollama's default, needs about 24 GB, and every major runtime runs it. The main risks are that nobody at Poolside answers its discussions, there are no safety results, and the SGLang route runs repository code.

Ling-3.0-tiny

A small, quick hybrid reasoning cousin for local agent work, tool calls and coding, under MIT. It runs in about 6 GB from inclusionAI's 4-bit GGUF in released Transformers, vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp, with no host. The main risks are a card that doesn't match the files in places, the vLLM route running repository code, and no model safety results.

Before you call either

Laguna XS 2.1

  1. Quickest start is ollama run laguna-xs-2.1, 20 GB of files, the same Q4_K_M as Poolside's GGUF
  2. On our reference machine use llama-server -hf poolside/Laguna-XS-2.1-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 131072, from a llama.cpp release with the laguna architecture (b11772 has it), or BF16 with vLLM (66.9 GB)
  3. With vLLM use --tool-call-parser poolside_v1 --reasoning-parser poolside_v1 --enable-auto-tool-choice, on a build with vllm-project/vllm#47311, or --tool-call-parser glm47 on older builds
  4. Thinking is off in the template unless you pass enable_thinking true or start the server with --default-chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": true}', which Poolside recommends for agentic coding
  5. Pass earlier reasoning back as reasoning_content in the history, since the card says reasoning may stop in later steps if it's dropped
  6. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0 and top_k 20
  7. The card warns that Ollama on Apple Silicon may return empty output until llama.cpp#25389 ships
  8. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented

Ling-3.0-tiny

  1. Start it with llama-server -hf inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 32768, which needs llama.cpp b11772 or a recent release with bailingmoe3
  2. With vLLM 0.32.0, vllm serve inclusionAI/Ling-3.0-tiny --trust-remote-code --enable-prefix-caching --mamba-cache-mode align --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser ling3 --reasoning-parser ling3, which runs the repository's config code
  3. With SGLang 0.5.22, its cookbook uses --reasoning-parser deepseek-r1 --tool-call-parser glm45 for this model, and drop the card's NEXTN flags since tiny has no MTP layer
  4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
  5. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20
  6. The template keeps earlier reasoning in the prompt, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented
  8. For a guardrail, inclusionAI's Ling-3.0-tiny-singprobe scores intent, unsafe output and hallucination per token, but only through SGLang and vLLM integration branches

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Laguna XS 2.1 or Ling-3.0-tiny?

Laguna XS 2.1 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Ling-3.0-tiny's 55 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Ling-3.0-tiny leads on reach and documentation and upkeep.

Other comparisons with Laguna XS 2.1 or Ling-3.0-tiny

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.